Will Boomers die alone and unloved?

A friend of mine said the other day that if the WWII generation is the "Greatest Generation", then the baby boomers is the "Generation That Ruined Everything".

While I don't entirely share my friend's view, he makes a good point.

And who raised the Baby Boomers? The Greatest Generation! Heh.

I don't know about that. I've seen some pretty whiny Gen Xers, and it's not like we can claim to have fought a serious war, like Vietnam, or taken anything like serious responsibility for our views. Smack the Boomers for their errors if you must, but at least they did take ownership of them.

Why did the Greatest Generation fail to inculcate their values into the next generation? I believe the people of that generation thought their values were so obviously superior that their children would naturally understand and emulate them. However, a society that does not champion and teach its children why its values are superior will fail to pass them along.
What happened to these Boomer kids when they went off to college? They were preyed upon by the leftists. They were told "How can you trust the values of a racist society?" Because they had no grounding they allowed themselves to reject everything that was good, honorable and decent about America because she had failed to live up to her values in some areas.
Longman is correct judging from my evangelical church in suburban Denver. Young couples in their 20s and early 30s embrace and celebrate having children. So for all those folks who bemoan red-state values. Just wait 10-20 years when the three and four kids from conservative mothers outnumber the only children or no children those urban elites had.

quote: "A majority or near majority of younger Americans, having grown up in conservative and religious households, will tend to view childless Boomers through their parents eyes: as members of an irresponsible, alien tribe. Though the minority of Baby Boomers who rebelled against tradition have a hard time recognizing it, most people wind up adopting their parent’s belief systems, particularly if they become parents themselves. The apple rarely falls far from the tree."

Sounds like how me and my brothers view the Boomers, with my parents as part of the minority.

rr

The other thing that I wonder about is this: if all those childless boomers had joined religious orders, would conservatives have had a problem with it?

If they had joined religious orders, we wouldn't be paying for their retirement, or at least not nearly as much.

The only good news here is that Baby Boomer parents have tended to be unusually close to their children.

From my POV, this is very true. I get along quite well with my Boomer parents, more so than they did with theirs. The only conflict we have is that I don't like playing video games, and my dad's a fanatic.

elizebeth, most call Y 1980-1995.

I'm just projecting birthrates based upon surveys on what women want for family size. Pretty accurate barring some sort of war or social crisis. The only generations "done" breeding we can tally up are Boomer and Greatest.

I worry for my generation, as we stumble along through the world trying to find our own way, for the most part completely unprepared for the task of supporting ourselves and our families. We were lab-rats and cannon-fodder in someone else's culture war, and then forgotten about once we graduated high school.

Well, maybe we have another contender for the whiniest generation after all.

There are some social networks out there for Seniors now. Meals On Wheels deliveries to shut-ins comes to mind where volunteers do phenom. work and keep up with the at risk elderly for very short money.
(mileage reimbursements).

Of course those programs along with home health care will need to ramp up and expand. And with the shortages in nurses, the VNA's will probably be hard pressed. But since many nurses still prefer the hours and flexibility of being a visiting nurse they should still be going strong. I think the nursing homes and long term care facilities are going to have the most difficult time recruiting workers and keeping up with the demand for new beds.

There's a big elderly population trend in New England so people are working hard on these issues up here.

Btw. Meals on Wheels - the only good program I can think of that's been introduced by Ted Kennedy. God love him. :)

allen, A common feeling amongst my peers is that we're having to make all this up as we go along, because the several generations before us have left us little or nothing of value worth holding on to.

A well-written post. I absolutely agree: every generation gives the next one less and less. This is not a whine; it's a fact. The culture is impoding, and this is just the giant sucking sound.

JLF: Not many Gen X wives want responsibility for changing her father-in-law's Depends. Nope.

Absolutely true. The reason is simple here: feminism. That Gen-X wife will be working her a-s off at her job. So it's nursing home time, except for the traditional parent who raised traditional girls.

This reality is reflected in a quote from the above article: The sympathy of the working young will be tested, for sure, when their taxes rise to finance public pensions and health-care subsidies for elderly people who are more prosperous than they are. I don't think they will be thinking about changing Depends when they are trying and failing to match their parent's standard of living.

Some other enlightening quotes from the article(s) above:

Women are usually the caretakers of both parent and child—not merely the physical caretakers, but the people who make sure that Mom got a phone call this week and a lavish family dinner on her birthday. As women’s lives are increasingly pulled outside the family sphere, they will not be able to maintain the current level of engagement with their parents.

When they are choosing between their own consumption desires, and the wants of total strangers, seniors for the most part act in the way that rational self-interest models would predict. As a bloc, they vote for less spending on schools, and more spending on health care and pensions. And they mostly believe that this is no more than their due, having worked hard all their lives.

Today’s elderly have already indulged the temptation to maximize their current consumption at the expense of future generations. America’s entitlement problems are simply the national version of the “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance” t-shirts popular with a certain type of senior. How will American policy, and culture, look when the numerous elderly have a lot fewer children to give them a stake in our collective future?

The grimreaper was born 9/18/1948. He is a boomer.
First: Almost without exception, any rock n roll song that contains the words "rock n roll" is crap.
Second: Any generalization about a generation is, almost without exception, crap.
Third: Being members of the same generation is the weakest form of solidarity (I don't know if I'm stealing that from Twain or Vonnegut).
Fourth: A generation is a bokonon (definitely Vonnegut).
Fifth: Boomers will die, and whether or not they die alone and unloved matters not.

Medical science has succeeded in keeping us alive beyond the point when nature wants us to die. Something like 70% of all of the healthcare costs an American incurs come in the last two years of his life. For what? So he can be so feeble or addled that he can't call someone on the phone and tell them he no heat, no air-conditioning, no food? When you get to that point, you should already be dead.

Fear of death may be natural, but death is part of nature. When the time comes, shut up and die.

A well-written post. I absolutely agree: every generation gives the next one less and less. This is not a whine; it's a fact.

It is a whine. I could point to just about any generation in American history and find a basis for this claim. At this point in history, Americans are far more secure than any other. We face no serious enemy. Who's the biggest threat: Muslim terrorists, who could be dealt with by shutting off immigration from Muslim countries.

Getting less? In what terms? Not material. You can get just about anything you want by clicking a few buttons on the computer. You can get things no one 20 years ago would have even thought of. I know the oil argument might change this, but that's still in the future. Right now, we do have plenty.

If people are unhappy with things, blaming the Boomers, the Xers, the Yers or anyone else is just a waste of time: whining. You don't like things going the way they are? Change them. Hell, have more kids. Do without the high end consumers items.

The culture is imploding, and this is just the giant sucking sound.

The culture in the U.S. has been "imploding" for nigh on two centuries. Yes, we're going to have rough spots, but like almost all metaphorical time-bombs, I highly doubt this one will go off too.

**As Dick Cavett once quipped, “If your parents forgot to have children, chances are you will as well.”**

I know as an intentionally childless man I am swimming into the tsunami on this issue with this group -- but it still blows my mind that no one got Cavett's punchline.

He was making a point about dysfunctional families -- if families neglect children and provide them with dysfunctional influences (Lord knows my folks did in the '70s, albeit under the influence of the most anti-child time in American history), the kids ain't gonna be likely to want kids themselves.

Like, um, me.

(Or, if you take Cavett's joke more icily, he's saying that dysfunctional families produce ... more dysfunctional families. So which of the two possible outcomes is better for society?)

It's was joke, Grim, just a joke. Put down the scythe!

Can't the grimreaper take a break from his important duties and laugh a little? You have the busy season coming up, so relax while you can.

Wow. Throughout this thread I've found myself agreeing with M_David in tone as well as content. Eeerie.

Speaking of which, M_David, I do wish to apologize for the rather intemperate post I directed at you on the Black, Brown, and Dallas thread. I went too far in my anger.

Derek -- its not our material conditions I'm frustrated with. I am fully aware and very grateful that I live in what is probably the most materially comfortable society in history. That's not what I'm talking about. At a fundamental level, many people around my age, in our early to mid twenties and the ones coming along behind us, have no clue how to function in the real world as adults. We weren't raised to become adults.

I'm not saying that we're in some uniquely tragic and unprecedented position. Frankly, it smacks of Boomeresque narcissism to interpret my words that way. I'm saying that we're the heirs to a century of screwed up families, and I'm not hopeful that we'll make things much better.

I'm puzzled by Longman's comment regarding communal assisted living for "those who can afford it." It's not Boomers who will pay for it but the younger generations they failed to sire. In their early 120s they will be sitting around the pool at the communal assisted living center, drinking a cocktail of embryonic stem cells and talking to their fellow Boomer friends about the scarcity of healthy clones and the organs they provide on the open market place and what should be done to improve that situation. It takes time for a culture (and an economy) to die and I have no doubt that Boomers have the fortitude to ride ours to the bitter end. It's a demographic battle for resources and unless Xers and Ys step up to the plate, and fast, they're going to get eaten. Literally.

Actually, most women have always been in the workforce, along with the men. With the exception of some of the wealthiest. And I mean for money. The major difference, along with the men, is HOW we work. Women, and men, usually worked on site with their children right beside them.

It is the modern style of working that is new, not that women ARE working. Heck, even the infamous Proverbs 31 woman was buying and selling in the marketplace.

Don't confuse a few decade's anomaly for a relatively narrow income range for the way things always were.

Paul Fussell's various books are a pretty good exposé of postwar American academia. Foreign-born academics like Hannah Arendt also gave it a good close look.

"Your average college prof" of the 1960s was a WW2 vet or part of the WW2 war effort, or a refugee from 1930s/WW2 Europe. The barbarities of that war is what made many of them liberals, i.e. people in favor of liberal democratic civilization and toleration rather than purportedly divinely ordained social orders buttressed with absolutist ideologies. However, they also considered the adult masses everywhere poisoned to various degrees with provincial ignorance, susceptibility to authoritarianism, and deep chauvinisms.

For all the straw-clinging to differential childbearing and Couéism, the Pew pollings and aggregate of evidence shows constant but slow socially liberal shift since the peaking of conservative social views around 1977-1982. Around 1980 happens to be when nationwide crime rates, abortion rates, gun ownership rates, poverty rates, and a slew of other statistical indicators of social dysfunction and disintegration peak. Divorce rates also show a peaking at the time iirc, but that seems to have been regionally concentrated then in and around the Coastal cities. The more recent peak is concentrated in 'the Heartland'.

The differential childbearing thing is disproven by history. Competing ethnic groups have won mostly transient victories by it in small regions of the world, but established elites have never much changed due to lower classes, especially 'downward mobile' ones, increasing their birthrate.

There once was a man called M_David,
Who decried all the females who weren't gravid.
"Back to children and church!"
He would caw from his perch--
But the women all told him to save it.

What Karen says is correct. Throughout most of history, men, women, and children have all worked from an early age. In the Industrial age of the late 19th/early 20th century, most children worked in the factories with their mothers and fathers and had their limbs hacked off by machines (as did their mothers and fathers). It was a sudden boom in economic prosperity, the G.I. Bill, and various government measures that created the "Howdy Doody" family of the 1950s. It was only a matter of time before that anomaly in history would be shown for what it was, an anomaly.

Now, it is true that overall we are not having enough children and we would benefit from having a larger workforce to pay the social security of the "boomers" who are in the midst of retiring. But on the other hand, one might argue that perhaps the "greatest generation" had too many children. After all, if the "greatest generation" had been a group of good stewards, they would have tempered their sexual appetites and produced maybe 2 or 3 children a piece. This would have continued and we would have a society where one generation replaced the rest without one generation excessively burdening the next. I believe Plato said something about this in the "Republic."

So, I don't get the "us vs. them" mentality between generations. It seems to me that the same conservatives who gloat over the failures of their parents' generation are just disobeying the command to "honor thy father and mother." In my view, clean up your own house and be the best person that you can be. But complaining about a past generation does no good and won't solve any problem.

Oh, and by the way, I'll add that one of the wisest things said to me, by a Lutherna minister and friend of mine, was that the biggest mistake of the "boomer" generation was to teach their children that the answer to all things was to blame their parents' generation.

The self-evaporation of white liberals (so many of them irreligious and immoral) is not the worst thing in the world. "The future belongs to those who show up for it". The future of the US will belong to family-oriented Latino and other cultures who are of a Christian culture. Having kids (as many as possible) and raising them as Christian is the best kind of evangelism, while the liberal/feminist cohort decides to pursue money over life-bringing.

Actually, the well to do, regardless of religious upbringing, tend to have fewer children than the less well to do, and that's been consistent (with obvious exceptions, this is a trend) even before there was reliable contraception. I don't know why, maybe those arranged marriages of the wealthy ensured less attraction, hard to say.

If lower breeding rates meant that a group was going to 'win' or 'lose', then poor people 'beat' the rich people.

Richer Latino people have smaller families than ones that are more poor, same goes for (in this country, at least) Muslims, etc.

Here's the funny part about the difference between the premise, and then the conclusion.

The whole article laid out the different generations. Went on about what each generation's values and goals were, how they raised their children, and how the next generation turned out based on that. And in each and every case, it was differently than the generation that raised it.

So, what do they conclude? That in direct contrast to the whole rest of the article, because a conservative group breeds more, that they will have more children that will grow up, and unlike all the others, turn out [i]just like them[/i], and this means the future will be more conservative.

Heck, if it follows all the other examples, their children will rebel, as all kids do, follow their own path, and turn out, well, any way BUT like their parents. After all, the golden era of the 50's, with their 'grey flannel men', their June Cleavers, and their crew cuts and conformity was the breeding ground FOR the 'flower children' of the 60's.

Wally and the 'Beav' grew up, tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.

What makes you think that conservative parents inevitably end up with conservative children, or vice versa?

Die? Whatever gave you that idea? With organ cloning we are going to live forever and YOU are going to pay for us!

Ha ha ha!

Heck, if it follows all the other examples, their children will rebel, as all kids do, follow their own path, and turn out, well, any way BUT like their parents. After all, the golden era of the 50's, with their 'grey flannel men', their June Cleavers, and their crew cuts and conformity was the breeding ground FOR the 'flower children' of the 60's.

But did the leaders and the kids come from "conservative" households? You're pointing to a caricature of the 50s, just as many create a caricature of the '60s. You still had liberal and left-leaning movements around, from old-style New Dealers to the actual commies. A lot of the sixties radicals were red-diaper babies, children of the reds from the 30s.

As one of the poster above mentioned, liberals used to have kids, too. This seems to be petering out because of things like the pill as well as greater job opportunities for women. Will there still be liberals coming from conservative parents? Yes, but not at nearly the same pace as from more liberal households. This, according to Longman, will affect where the country goes.

There may have been some 'red diaper' babies still around. But unless the 50's was highly different from pictured (in which case, being raised by that same 'Great Generation', IT was highly different than depicted), not enough to have created the sheer numbers we see in the 60's.

Doesn't have to just be the 'leaders'. Unless you see the conservative kids of conservative parents able to be swept into a movement against their basic beliefs simply based on the say-so of the leaders.

Oh, I know. Indeed, that was part of the point.

The 50's can't be, in one and the same breath, described as what we should go back to, and also the breeding ground for what happened in the 60's due to all those evil commies that were apparently lingering around every corner, raising most of the next generation.

John E. Dumbstruck.

For a minute, I thought this was his last name.

...hehehe...

Derek, I feel compelled to point out that I do wake up, go to work every day, and pay my bills. I haven't been supported by my parents since I was 14, and not by anyone but myself since I was 17. As for the wife and kids -- it's funny that you mention that. I'd love to be married and start a family (via adoption, of course). That "limited" government conservatives love so much won't allow me to.

Thanks Susan.

I also know lots of my peers still being supported by Mom and Dad (or whomever is analagous in their particular situation) despite being quite brilliant, well-educated, capable of competing in the marketplace for jobs that could allow them to live on their own relatively comfortably. But since Mom and Dad are letting them live at home, rent- and bill-free, they do, and their parents seem to have expectation otherwise. I find it kind of horrifying that almost everyone I know in my age bracket who is self-sufficient is that way because they come from a horribly dysfunctional or abusive family that they effectively had to escape.

Some things never change. The older generation sees the younger as going straight downhill. The younger generation sees the mistakes that the older generation makes and is certain that they have the answers and won't make the same mistakes. Sure enough they don't make the same mistakes, they make their own mistakes for which their children will fault them.

Susan, but a whole generation?? They're all airheads who need to live with Mommy?

Airhead? I think the term of choice is "whiner."

I don't think words do well to explain the ennui that is swimming around in the culture today. But I thought the video and lyrics of the song "Dégénerations" by Mes Aïeux (it was mentioned on this blog a while back) was apropos to why X and beyond are generally listless about the future.

The video shows an old, poor, turn-of-the-century man delivering a wheelbarrow of rich soil to his offspring. The next only gives a bucket to his daughter, who, now being rich and well dressed, only bothers to fill her purse, and when dumping out this tiny bit of soil to the last kid, an old family snapshot falls out, so the kid just buries it in the tiny amount of soil left and walks away, all to the lyrics:

Your great great grandmother, she had 14 kids
Your great grandmother had about as many
Then your grandmother had three, that was enough for her
Your mom didn’t want any, you were an accident

Now you, my little lady, change partners all the time
When you screw up you save yourself by aborting
But there are mornings you awake crying
When you dream in the night of a large table surrounded by little ones.

But is wasn't a complete whine...the final lines offered the solution to a culture not worth investing in:

Put on your best, we are going out celebrating tonight!

BTW, my grandmother's brother, the one who died in a farming accident, was the son who was expected to be a farmer even though he didn't want to be. Co-incidence?

Marian, I read an article about nuns who were nearing retirement, who have essentially been abandoned by the institution they gave their lives to...

Alicia, I'm not saying the present day is wonderful, but the "good old days" were all too often, terrible.

Mother Nature does not ask us to be happy, or to expect life to be fair. She merely demands we survive. My point isn't that the past was good, merely that at least they got the job done.

But the current culture is so obviously doomed we should expect ennui among the young. Kids wouldn't be human if they were happy about living in a culture of death, with the grimreaper always standing at their shoulder. It's the cultural end of the line, and they know it. So why not just party the night away?

Indeed, the ones who are at all clever will outright rebel and desert their parents to their folly, and work to create a culture of their own that has real legs. They owe it to their (potential) grandchildren.

Many births per woman were a necessity when a large percentage of the babies did not survive to adulthood. They were also a survival advantage when labor was needed on the farm. Neither of those situations exists in American 'burbs now.

I was musing on the question someone posed earlier - why didn't the (so-called) greatest generation pass on their values? Wow - assuming they all shared values to begin with, aren't we forgetting that the depression was a formative life experience and the war changed everything? The Organization Man and the endless expansion of suburbs didn't reflect any of the life they had lived in the teens, 20s and 30s. Suburbs are not the same as small towns or city neighborhoods. Then there was the technology - TV and AC, which allowed everyone to close up the house on summer nights instead of sitting on the front porch hoping to catch a breeze. Cheaper cars, transistor radios (that allowed separate musical cultures to develope) and so on and so on...

Let's face it - these people did not know how their early childhood related to the new world.

My paternal grandma - not a GGer but a Victorian - was born in the 1890s into farm life (only 3 kids, however) and died in 1988. What could she have possibly done based on her upbringing, to shape her children to shape their children? She raised them in the angry, self-sacrificing Methodist way she was raised but it did not fit the world her children went out to face. My mom-in-law, now 90, was raised in a small town. Her mother ran the family grocery store because her father always lost money when he ran it, until the mother finally kicked him out (but at least they never divorced! - Dad just disappeared - she doesn't even know where he was buried). Her 3 sons, 1 born 1941, the others "boomers" were stunned as they matured, to discover that the world was not at all as mother had portrayed it.

In other words, maybe the changes that came so fast were out of their control and we should ease up on the criticism and look for workable solutions instead of engaging in intergenerational sniping.

Before allowing your discriminatory comments to stand -- yes, discriminatory and marginalizing when you apply stereotypes to a large group of people -- I thought you should think about a long list of outstanding people who did not have children, for whatever reasons:

Mo Mowlam, Cabinet minister and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (UK)
Mari Matsunaga, Japanese innovator of i-mode, voted in top 25 tech women of the web
Lauren Hutton, model/actress
Marlo Thomas, actress
Stephanie Zimbalist, actress
Patrick Swayze, actor
Betty White, actress
Kevin Spacey, actor
Margaret Mitchell, author
Julia Roberts, actress
Quentin Tarantino, writer/director
Randy Travis, singer
Dwight Yokam, singer
Lara Flynn Boyle, actress
Daryl Hannah, actress
Diane Sawyer, news reporter
Mickey Rourke, actor
Mary Cassatt, Impressionist painter
Annie Oakley
Arthur C. Clark (step-father, but none of his own)
Baroness Karen Blixen, author (Out of Africa)
Oprah Winfrey, talk show host
Amelia Earhart, adventurer
Ann Bancroft (the polar explorer, not the actress)
Simone de Beauvoir, writer
Gloria Steinem, feminist activist/writer
Helen Keller, author
Annie Sullivan, H. Keller's teacher
Jessye Norman, opera singer
Mother Teresa, nun
George Washington (step-father but none of his own)
Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter
Immanuel Kant, philosopher
Jesus Christ
Lawrence of Arabia
William Lyon MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister
Joan of Arc
Florence Nightingale
Susan B. Anthony, nineteenth-century suffragist
Lorena Hickok, AP political reporter
Harriet Tubman, underground Railroad
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, first female physician in the US
Carrie Chapman Catt, US suffrage leader
M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College
Ella Fitzgerald, jazz vocalist
Emily Dickinson, poet
Jeanette Rankin, first female US Representative
Margaret Bourke-White, photographer
Julia Child, French cook
Ayn Rand, philosopher/author
Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, computer pioneer
Billy Jean King, tennis player
Marian Anderson, opera singer
Scott Adams, creator, Dilbert
Brett Butler, comedienne
Stockard Channing, actress
George Clooney, actor
Mary Crosby, actress
Linda Evans, actress
Reginald VelJohnson, actor
Nanci Griffith, singer
Katherine Hepburn, actress
Bonnie Raitt, singer
Rita Rudner, comedienne
Dr. Seuss, author
Christopher Walken, actor
Bill Watterson, creator, Calvin and Hobbes
Yanni, composer/musician
Larry Kahn, listed in Guinness Book of World Records
Jay Leno, host, Tonight Show
David Letterman, host, Late Show
Christine McVie, singer/songwriter
Bill Maher, host, Politically Incorrect
George Michael, singer
Helen Mirren, actress
Stevie Nicks, singer
Georgia O'Keefe, artist
Dorothy Parker, writer
Sara Teasdale, poet

To name a few ...

Applying stereotypes and negative expectations to a group of people simply who are childless -- and many not by choice but circumstances -- is just another form of racism or sexism.

Further, don't underestimate the power of boomers to transform old age, death and dying in creative ways that haven't even been invented yet.

And this idea of "stewardship of the boomer generation" (implying shortcomings) is just more conservative clap-trap. Boomers have made this nation far more inclusive, creating tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations, and today are in the majority of funders of the nation's charities. These are facts, not stereotypes.

This is all kind of silly, really. Given that Rod is of an age to be a child of "Boomers" (I think he's the age of my eldest) the whole post comes off as, "Our parents were flawed! flawed! They'll die alone and unloved!"

I've listened to enough of this stuff from my older children (now 38 and 40) to learn how to tune it out. The discovery that your parents are not gods and goddesses is supposed to happen a lot sooner than 38 (I was thinking more like, 8) and is hardly earth-shaking news, since every generation makes it in turn. ("Sun Rises In East!")

You-all just wait until those little kids you have turn 35! You haven't heard criticism yet!

Yes, Susan. Your post made me chuckle. In my case, three out of four adult children have given us a vote of confidence, and the fourth has confined her commentary to kind but firm suggestions as to how we could pull up our socks and straighten up our act. Even she, however, has approached me privately to inform me that if I get old and infirm, I really must come to live with HER and not her sister, or she'll feel put upon. And the other sister says the same. So I don't have too much fear of dying alone.

Between birth and now, though, we got our share of vigorous and epithet-laden critique. Which we accepted as graciously as possible and continued to love them, because, y'know, that's what parents do. One of my most treasured mementos is a home-made Mother's Day card from my daughter who had the most trouble with us earlier in her life. It has a picture of her firstborn pasted on it, and the simple words, "Dear Mom: I get it now. I really do."

As for the boomer-hataz . . . as a novelist, I'd say that if they were characters in a novel, their back story would write itself. I'm tempted to tell that story for them, but I'll restrain myself in the interests of decorum. Even though my typing fingers are itching.

Statistical wickedness--now there's a new concept in theological-numerological fusion.

I am somewhat childlike, and I do love justice, even after all my attempts to temper my mind with mercy according to the advice of Jesus. So I'm hoping I'll be around when M_David's children grow up. ; )

"The boomers were an especially wicked generation..."

...who should have had more children.

I can never understand wanting such awful people to reproduce.

"The anti-natalism inherent in the modern liberal mindset leads to a gradual return of patriarchy, if only by default. "

This makes no sense. The more children a woman has, the more she is dependent on men. Being confined to procreation and child care also limits her economic and general power; Hence male power increases. -> Breeding increases patriarchy, you've got it backwards.

- Gen X female, Child Free By Choice

Sorry, all. I made the post about kids being insurance but neglected to put in my name.

The Boomers have lived their entire miserable lives "alone and unloved". Why should that greedy, lazy, selfish, generation die any different?

I, for one, will enjoy peeing on their graves.

Are you so naive to believe that in reality, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". For all the kids that grow up to adopt their parents politics and morals, there are an equal number that grow up to have different politics and morals. In addition, I challenge anyone to argue that, on the whole, younger generations are more conservative than the preceding generations. I can't even count the number of liberal people I know who are liberal & atheists or agnostics purely because they grew up in a religious, conservative household.
With respect to care of elders, show me some valid statistics that support that more seniors are being cared for by their families, either physically or financially, rather than paying for their own care in nursing homes with their own savings or social security.